3TIER, a provider of renewable energy risk analysis, has announced that it has been selected through a competitive solicitation process by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory to update the U.S. wind integration data set.
3TIER says the project is a ‘massive undertaking’ and will be used directly by NREL to explore the potential impacts of integrating large quantities of wind energy onto the U.S. electrical grid.
Accommodating increased quantities of wind energy while ensuring grid reliability will require infrastructure investments, such as new transmission lines and advanced energy dispatching technologies.
By comparing wind energy production data created by 3TIER with energy demand projections, a picture emerges of prerequisite infrastructure changes, allowing relevant parties to determine the most cost-effective and pertinent forms of infrastructure expansion, 3TIER explains.
The new study will use an enhanced yet consistent methodology to provide 2007-2011 wind data across the entire continental U.S., leveraging numerical weather-prediction simulations and other statistical techniques.
The resulting 100+ TB data set will include five years of five-minute meteorological data at a horizontal resolution of 2 km and detailed energy-production profiles for 100,000 potential onshore wind project locations and 10,000 potential offshore project locations.
